[Wocky] access to see a new user's presence

[Ken Raeburn]

Is there some trick to when you can add a contact and have them  
eventually get prompted to grant permission for you to see them online?

I ran into a situation today where I had added someone a few days  
ago, and today was the first time she signed on to the mit.edu jabber  
server.  When she did, she didn't get prompted, but I deleted her  
from my contact list and re-added her, and then she did.  Was this  
just a random hiccup, or do you generally have to wait until someone  
has signed on at least once before you can add them as a contact?  Do  
the Jabber accounts not exist (on the mit.edu server setup) before  
the first sign-on, so that my adding a non-existent contact gets some  
special, lame treatment?

I've got quite a few contacts I added because I just copied their  
names over from my Zephyr .anyone file, and if I have to go back and  
figure out which ones I should delete because they haven't signed on  
ever, or didn't before I added them, that'll be a real pain.  I  
understand the privacy issue involved in figuring out which accounts  
those might be from data on the server.  I could just delete and re- 
add all the @mit.edu contacts I don't recall having seen on Jabber,  
but it's not clear to me if that has any annoying side effects, like  
revoking their access to see me online, or re-prompting them if  
they've already chosen to deny me access to see them, or  
something....  (Can I just re-add them without deleting them?  Would  
that work?)

Ken